17 October 1993
The ’90s resurgence in power balladry was in part the US music industry’s way of sweeping the Milli Vanilli lip-syncing scandal under the carpet: they lucked onto Mariah Carey, saw how her debut single caused a sensation and a flurry of record-buying, then lumped in on her strain of loud, technically impressive money-note vocals as a lucrative pivot away from ’80s studio pop. I don’t recall Meat Loaf’s comeback as being an organic or grassroots movement—and not long beforehand he had been hawking his wares around the provincial towns of Ireland—but instead being astroturfed fairly early as “here’s Meat Loaf’s spectacular return to form; now go buy it!” Millions duly did; in most territories worldwide this was the biggest-selling single of 1993.
No less than crediting a studio singer’s lead vocals to a lip-syncing ‘live’ performer, be it Milli Vanilli or Black Box, not crediting the singer at all is a pretty lousy bit of music industry sharp practice too. The female lead vocal on the climactic final verse of ‘I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)’, who duets with Mr Loaf and gets the song’s best line (the brilliantly acerbic “Sooner or later you’ll be screwin’ around!”) was credited to a “Mrs Loud”. In fact, it was performed by an English singer called Lorraine Crosby, who was also managed by Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell writer-producer Jim Steinman. The woman in the Michael Bay-directed video for this song isn’t Lorraine Crosby, but a model called Dana Patrick who’s miming to Crosby’s voice. How hard can it be just to credit the singer and have them appear in the video?
I don’t have anything much positive to say about the rest of the song either: it’s boilerplate Steinman bombastic melodrama. Bonnie Tyler might have given this a bit of kitschy wild-eyed humour à la ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’, but Meat Loaf is just a sweaty shouter. Underneath the shouting is, aside from the refreshing snark of Crosby’s line above, a fairly bland song whose convoluted lyrics on The Meaning Of “That” gave it an unintentional comic afterlife, at least if you find daytime radio DJs funny. The other thing that irritates me about ‘I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)’ is the clunker of a line about “sex and drums and rock ‘n’ roll”, another giveaway that this is a craven, contrived mainstream rock product.
Crosby, by the way, seemed to bear no ill will towards Meat Loaf and spoke fondly of him after his death. She ended up as a contestant on ITV’s The X Factor in 2005 and BBC’s The Voice in 2013 but without success. Via her website, Lorraine Crosby is available for weddings and functions.
